Ron mentions this Kornis Rift early in the talk.I never played it (yet), but the cover looks more like Oculus Rift than Koronis Rift!

Interesting that he calls it 'a few weeks' of coding in assembly before starting to code SCUMM. It was a very barebones and basic time back then, no AGS, no SCUMM, no fancy engines, but I guess I would have figured out the need for an engine even faster...

Well, most companies and even single authors created their own engines back then, and the thing still went on up until the early nineties at least. Then it became more popular to borrow or buy engines made by others, but still nowadays new engines get created from time to time.

And some bring with them the most important revolutions in gaming history. Scumm, Doom Engine, Unreal Engine, Cryengine are just examples (some are graphical, I know, but the concept is the same).